Harold A. Gould - The South Asia Story: The First Sixty Years of Us Relations with India and Pakistan

C onsciousness of South Asia actually originated during World War II, considerably prior to the dawning of the postwar era. In the end, of course, the basis for everything became the Cold War. The latter occurred only after important regime changes had taken place both in the United States and South Asia. In the United States the change can be said to have been intramural: from the New Deal liberals who had been politically dominant throughout the Great Depression and most of World War II to a Trumanesque breed of conventional, balance-of-power hard-liners who rose to prominence after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945. In South Asia, the change was both extramural and intramural: from the British Raj to political independence, and from an unitary subcontinental geopolitical entity to a politically subdivided Subcontinent consisting of the two separate states of India and Pakistan.

Out of these transformations emerged new political realities, which profoundly shaped relations between America and the Indic world for the ensuing six decades, affecting in turn every subsequent U.S. administration.

India, under the Congress Party, led by Jawaharlal Nehru and the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, would adopt liberal democracy, secularism, a Socialist idiom for economic development, and a so-called non-aligned approach to international relations. Pakistan, led by the Muslim League and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, would establish itself as an Islamic state governed by a viceregal political system, with a quasi-capitalist economy, a polity controlled by traditional landlords, a colonial-era bureaucratic elite, and a Punjabi-dominated military establishment. Both countries were born in an atmosphere of ethno-religious conflict and a perpetual state of mutual hostility over entitlement to the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir.

At the core of the doctrinal synthesis that evolved in the United States at this time was an obsessive and in the process, I contend, doomed America's South Asia policy to eventual failure.

Out of the public debate that determined America's approach to South Asia, came a regional strategy with five explicit aims: (i) to prevent communist bloc pene-tration from outside the region, (ii) to deter the rise of domestic communism within the region, (iii) to prevent intraregional war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir or indeed any other precipitant, (iv) to promote economic development throughout the Subcontinent based upon free-market economics, and (v) to encourage the evolution and preservation of democratic political institutions.

At the earliest point of significant contact between India and the United States, and even for a brief time following World War II, however, the martial scenario for controlling events in South Asia had not achieved the dominant standing in the policy-making domain that subsequently proved to be the case. The point when it became the dominant motif goes back to the already alluded to factional cleavage between the New Deal liberals and the more conservative wing of the Democratic party that occurred around the time of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's nomination for a fourth term.

This conflict was inherent in the struggle over who should be selected as Roosevelt's running mate for vice-president. The liberals choice was the incumbent vice-president, Henry Agard Wallace, who advocated radical social and economic change both at home and abroad, versus the conservatives choice, Senator Harry S. Truman, who represented a more conventional approach to both domestic and foreign policy. When the latter faction won out, and when after Roosevelt's death in 1945, followed by the accession of Harry S. Truman to the presidency, the stage was set for a showdown over postwar foreign policy. The Yalta summit meeting in February 1945 had churned up great controversy among the American political establishment over whether too much had been conceded to Stalin in the run-up to the impending postwar political process. The advisors upon whom Truman increasingly relied were primarily foreign policy hawks emanating from the conservative wing of the party, who viewed the impending postwar world order with alarm. They believed that the victorious Soviet Union and the powerful Red Army were poised to pursue a relentless course of world conquest, employing MarxistLeninist doctrines as their ideological shibboleth.

With respect to South Asia, however, importantly because of Roosevelt's and other New Dealers anti-colonialist predilections, the United States was favor-ably disposed toward the emergence of nationalism in the Indian Subcontinent and indeed other parts of the globe as well (for example, Southeast Asia, especially Vietnam and Indonesia). It was seen as a promising trend toward some form of political autonomy coupled with democracy for India and other former colonial states once the war ended, which might be a model for postcolonial nations everywhere. Had postwar American foreign policy continued in this spirit after the war ended and shown deeper understanding and appreciation of Nehru's determination to create a bul-wark against political extremism and totalitarianism by making India a viable, peaceful democracy, while main-taining neutrality between the two emergent global power blocs, the Cold War might well have been kept out of the region.

But this was not to be once the policy hawks won the day in the United States.